Before Orlando Shooting, an Anti-Gay Massacre in New Orleans Was Largely Forgotten

Firefighters treating survivors of the fire at the UpStairs Lounge in New Orleans in June 1973.Credit
G.E. Arnold/Associated Press

The terrorist attack that killed 49 and wounded 53 in Orlando, Fla., was the largest mass killing of gay people in American history, but before Sunday that grim distinction was held by a largely forgotten arson at a New Orleans bar in 1973 that killed 32 people at a time of pernicious anti-gay stigma.

Churches refused to bury the victims’ remains. Their deaths were mostly ignored and sometimes mocked by politicians and the media. No one was ever charged. A joke made the rounds in workplaces and was repeated on the radio: “Where will they bury the queers? In fruit jars!”

Outpourings of grief from politicians and everyday people have followed the Orlando shooting, but for those who remember the fire in the New Orleans bar, the UpStairs Lounge, its lonely memory has loomed large over conversations about the carnage this week at the Pulse nightclub.

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Mike Moreau, 72, who lost several friends in the fire, said he was struck by all the differences between then and now, but also by the familiarity of tragedy’s dull ache.

“What happened to us had to be kept so private,” said Mr. Moreau. “The public didn’t want to know about it, and if they heard about it they didn’t care — ‘Thank God, they’re gone, they deserved it.’”

“To see the outpouring of love and support that these poor families have gotten is fantastic,” he added about the Orlando massacre. “They are hurting the same way we hurt, but at least they know that the world supports them and understands their grief.”

Mr. Moreau was with friends at a nearby bar on June 24, 1973, when an arsonist doused the stairs of the UpStairs Lounge with lighter fluid, set it aflame and rang the doorbell. When someone answered the door, a fireball burst into the room.

Photo

When firefighters extinguished the blaze at the UpStairs Lounge in New Orleans, they found a pile of charred bodies, some embracing and others pressed against the windows.Credit
Jack Thornell/Associated Press

One group of patrons fled out a back exit, but another was trapped across the room, caught between the flames and floor-to-ceiling windows fitted with metal bars. When firefighters extinguished the blaze, they found a pile of charred bodies, some embracing and others pressed against the windows.

Congregants from the New Orleans chapter of the Metropolitan Community Church, an L.G.B.T.-affirming group, were meeting there after services. The Rev. Bill Larson was among the dead. His charred body was left slumped against the window bars in full view of passers-by for hours.

He was one of many who died without ever coming out to their families, and his mother would not deal with his remains, said Robert L. Camina, who directed a documentary, UpStairs Inferno, about the blaze.

“His mother refused to collect his ashes because she was too embarrassed that she had a gay son,” Mr. Camina said. “And that is just one example. There are three people who were never identified at all. Why? Somebody has to miss them.”

Photo

Linn Quinton cried as he was helped by firefighters after escaping from the fire in the French Quarter.Credit
Associated Press

Those three were buried in unmarked graves in a potter’s field along with a fourth person, Ferris LeBlanc, whose family did not know his fate until last year, Mr. Camina said.

“They dug a hole in the ground and put a bag in it and covered it back up,” Mr. Moreau said.

Public figures were unsupportive. The mayor, Moon Landrieu, did not cancel his vacation. Forty years later, a son of his, the current mayor, Mitch Landrieu, declared a day of public mourning for the fire’s victims on its anniversary.

“L.G.B.T. people have a place at the table now that they did not have then,” said Clayton Delery-Edwards, who wrote a book about the arson that was published in 2014.

The fire was an open wound for the gay community in New Orleans for years. No one was charged with the attack, and a man viewed by many as the primary suspect was never arrested. He committed suicide a year after the blaze.

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“There was never any sense of justice,” said Sebastian Rey, the president of the L.G.B.T. Community Center of New Orleans.

Survivors had to deny any connection to the fire, including the loss of loved ones, because they could lose their jobs or apartments if bosses and landlords suspected they were gay. Mr. Rey said people who lived through that period did not talk about it for decades. As time passed, the tragedy became “a rumor” to new generations of L.G.B.T. people, he said.

Johnny Townsend, who interviewed survivors in the late ’80s and finally published their accounts in 2014, said the 40th anniversary commemoration gave it a kind of public attention it had not had before. “People now feel more of a sense of their own history,” he said.

For Mr. Moreau, the outpouring of support for the victims in Orlando has been an “uplifting” sign of progress, he said.

"In Orlando, those poor people know at least that the whole world is behind them,” he said. “Nobody cared about us.”